Roblog

I got back on Friday from my family's 2-week driving trip up to Pennsylvania for my sister's wedding (which took place in Delaware). It will take me a few days to post the pictures from all the goings-on, but they'll be up there soon. In the mean time, a few notes from the trip:

• The girls did remarkably well in the car for 2-year-olds. Granted, we never had more than 7 hours of driving in one day, and we stopped at least once every two hours (unless they were asleep) to give them a chance to run around. It took planning, but it bodes well for future car trips.
• The wedding was beautiful, just like the couple. Although we had rain the days before the wedding, the threatened rain on the day of the wedding never came, and the valley was a gorgeous setting.
• I forgot to bring the USB cable to download the pictures from my camera to my Dad's laptop, so I had no easy way to off-load some pictures from the camera's memory card. As a solution, I stepped-down the image quality, which allowed me to store enough pictures on the 128 MB memory card so that we didn't have to keep from taking pictures we wanted to.
• It's wonderful to have a three-day weekend at home to settle back in before I head to work. I really should go in and get a head start on my emails, but I may not.
• The grass was very high after three weeks of growth. Apparently, it rained a lot in Houston while we were gone. The lawnmower just did get through it all.

I'm excited because we've decided to buy a new computer. My 5-year-old Macintosh has been out of date for some time now, but it was hanging on and it was hard to justify buying a new computer when our existing one works.

But we've decided it's time now, and I had already selected the kind I wanted: a 20" iMac. It would be wonderful to have an integrated CD and DVD burner along with the Apple iLife Suite. So I went to the Apple store to price it with the exact setup I wanted.

But what did I find when I when to the Apple Store? This:

This is unprecedented. Apple is selling exactly 0 iMacs for two months until the new ones are ready?!? Usually, Apple is very tight-lipped about upcoming hardware upgrades so that people continue to buy the old ones right up until the day the new ones are announced and available for ordering. This two-month gap speaks to someone not planning something correctly.

I must admit to having mixed feelings about the delay, though. I adore the current (old?) iMacs with their hemispherical shape and the "floating" LCD monitor above it. It would look so cool on my desk at home. But I was also worried about getting a G4 processor, which is on the way out, being replaced by the G5. Although there is no information about what the new iMacs will have, there is a general consensus that they will be G5 iMacs. So in this aspect, a forced two-month delay is a good thing for me. Apple is good at design, so I should trust that the new iMacs will be beautiful, too, although I really do love the current design.

Check back here in two months to see what I finally got to order.

I finally got the pictures from our trip up to my sister's wedding in Delaware posted (it took a while to title them all). I split the pictures up into three sections:

• Trip to West Grove - June 2004: from our car trip going to and coming back from West Grove, Pennsylvania.
• Rebecca's Wedding: any goings-on while we were in West Grove or Delaware (there are a few non-wedding related pictures, but not enough to warrant their own section)
• Visit to NJ - June 2004: from our visit with by brother-in-law's (Richard) family in Newark, NJ

Looking at the pictures section, I also notice I didn't post any "twins" pictures for June. But since I posted 4 other picture collections since May, I'll wait and post the June and July twins pictures together.

No details yet, but at least I know my next computer will be a G5 iMac. What it looks like and what other attributes it has, one can only guess.

So I will. I think it will look similar to the new displays Apple has recently released (brushed metal), but the screen will still "float" above the CPU enclosure. I think the mid-range iMac will have a 20" LCD screen. The G5 clock speed will start at 1.8 GHz, and it will have both USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 ports. The internal HD will be 80 MB, and it will come with a paltry 128 MB of RAM. Airport and Bluetooth will be add-ons.

When I order mine, I'll likely get as much RAM as I can stand along with the Bluetooth add-on. I'll be tempted to get the wireless keyboard (which uses Bluetooth) and a wireless trackball or mouse. I might get an iSight, too, but only if my Dad gets one. I think he'd be the only one I would use it with (at least at first).

The latest "Awwww-that-is-so-adorable" moment with the twins:

Last night when I put Amanda in her crib, she said "Good night sweet, little Daddy." Not to be left out, Elena then said "Good night sweet, little Mommy." It was awfully precious. I guess we say that sometimes when we put them to bed, but I hadn't really noticed.

They talk quite a lot now. It doesn't really seem that unusual to me, but they are almost always the most talkative children when I see them with their peers. That does not bode well for my phone bill when they are teenagers!

I've shut off the comments features of this blog for two reasons:

1. No one I knew was commenting
2. The last 150 comments I got were spam advertisements for either prescription drugs or porn

I can block IP addresses from being able to post to my blog, but that just slowed them down a little rather than stopping them. I quickly went from 9 IP addresses blocked to 52 in one week. That was a big hassle to delete all the spam comments and enter the IP address to block it. So I just turned off commenting.

I'm going to try to see how leaving the commenting on for the most recent entries works. If I continue to get spam comments, I'll turn it off completely.

Pepsi Edge still tastes like a diet soda to me. Blech. I'll stick with the full-sugared version for now.